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MOVIE VIOLENCE HAS CHANGED enormously over thedecades. The clean and sanitized displays of earlierperiods, in which characters could take a bullet at closerange with no visible damage inflicted, have given wayto the more baroque bloodletting of today’s films. Butwhatever style has been in fashion, viewers need tomake sense of it. Is it contrived, exciting, gratuitous?How true is it? The latter query is especially importantbecause viewers must assess the ways in which screenviolence fits with their sense of the world. How do theymake these assessments about degrees of realism? Onwhat factors do these judgments rest? Mel Gibson’s ThePassion of the Christ (2004) provides us with a vividillustration.

I am interested in these questions because theyreveal something fundamental about film style andhow viewers understand it, which film theory has notfully recognized. I will get to it by considering howmany viewers understand the violence in The Passion ofthe Christ. First, however, a premise: the violence in fic-tional films is always considerably less than real. It is astylistic construction, a formal design that portrays anevent on screen. These formal designs, of course, may

be elaborated with varying degrees of ornamentation,occupying a range from the relatively unembellishedbullet strikes in Hollywood films of the 1940s to themore flamboyant depictions found in Three Kings(1999), The Matrix (1999), and films by Sam Peckin-pah and John Woo.

In fiction films, violence is an event that is enactedthrough a structural design, through a deliberate or-chestration of camera positions, lighting, editing, andsound. It has always been such. By contrast, in docu-mentary films, real death may be portrayed. This isalmost never an option for fiction films, except in spe-cial cases where a film such as Weekend (1967) mayshow the killing of animals. But this is almost alwaysfatal to the fictional enterprise because the visual factsof actual death are so compelling, are so physically pres-ent, that they assault the viewer’s suspension of disbe-lief. Real death takes a viewer out of the fiction, and itmay prove very difficult for that viewer to resume thefictive stance.

When real death is shown on screen, and when theviewer knows it to be real as when viewing a documen-tary depicting an actual killing, the effect is uniquely

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Film Quarterly, Vol. 59, Issue 4, pages 11-22. ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2006 by The Regents of the University ofCalifornia. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the

University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

Jesus (Jim Caviezel) prepares for his scourging in The Passion of the Christ

■ Stephen Prince

Beholding Blood Sacrifice in The Passion of the Christ

How Real Is Movie Violence?

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sobering. It can be powerfully disturbing. Describing asequence in a documentary in which a submissive dogis attacked and torn apart by its pack, for example, DirkEitzen writes:

Even in a fiction film, seeing an event like thiswould be profoundly disturbing. Seeing it in adocumentary, I found it practically unbearable. Iwas literally nauseated. I wanted to turn away.And yet, because this was a documentary, I felt aneven stronger compulsion to watch. Even morethan that, I wanted to intervene. I wanted to pickup a rock and throw it at the dogs that were soviciously attacking one of their own kind.1

Eitzen finds that this desire to intervene is one ofthe key emotional appeals of documentary. Relative tofiction films, it is the difference between “That’s a ‘real’person crying” and “That’s an actor crying,” between ajudgment that real people are fighting and a judgmentthat characters played by actors are fighting.2 By con-trast, while fiction films may arouse powerful emotions,they typically do not include this desire to intervene inan unbearable situation. The frame of fiction that sur-rounds violent action staged for the camera tends toensure that the viewer remains within the imaginaryworld of the fiction.

And yet as the history of movie violence has dem-onstrated, people are often ready to take it as “real.”Among viewers who saw The Wild Bunch at a sneakpreview in 1969 and filled out response cards, manypraised the film for its “realism.” One wrote that it was

the “most realistic motion picture yet conceived.”3 De-spite the evident fact that they are staged for the cam-era, violent scenes in fiction films are quite capable ofevoking feelings of horror and extreme distress in view-ers. The rape scene in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) or thekilling and mutilations of Vietnamese villagers in Pla-toon (1986) exemplify the power of fictional violence.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ gives us astriking demonstration of the perceived realism of fic-tive violence. Among those most hostile to the film, itwas seen as a kind of violent pornography or an exer-cise in anti-Semitism. But among viewers who sup-ported the film, particularly Christians receptive to thisvery graphic modern rendition of a passion play, thejudgment was that Gibson had gotten it right, that thefilm was truthful and was the most accurate and realis-tic film depiction of the physical torments inflicted onJesus after his arrest. The responses of these viewers ex-emplify in especially clear terms the processes by whichspectators assess stylized and enacted violence as being“real.” I will, therefore, privilege this group of viewers inthe following discussion. Rather than describing therange of opinion on the film, I want to examine the re-sponses of this group of viewers in relation to the factsof the film’s stylized rendition of violence, and the em-pirical data on the ways that viewers attribute degreesof realism to fictional depictions. The responses ofthese Christian viewers are especially emphatic mani-festations of emotional and cognitive reactions that are,in fact, common to moviegoers in general.

As a passion play, Gibson’s film is designed to evokethe blood-cult origins of Christianity, to provide an en-

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A vision of transcendence based on extreme suffering

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actment of the sacrifice at the core of the religion. De-scribing the place of ritualized violence within religionsthroughout the world, Maurice Bloch notes that theserituals invariably involve an effort to leave the everydayworld behind. “This leave-taking . . . is visualized in themost obvious way possible, by a symbolic death, sincewhat is being negated is the transience of human life,and to go beyond life one must pass through death.This is death brought about by the ritual and thereforea kind of killing.”4 Moreover, it is a killing “that requiresfor its dramatic purposes a great show of leaving vitalitybehind [italics added] in order to be with transcenden-tal beings.” The need for a great show of leaving vitalitybehind, of surmounting fleshly existence, provides thepsychological and religious imperative for the film’s ex-traordinary violence. The greater the suffering and vio-lation of the flesh, the more decisively is a vision oftranscendence achieved. The Christian viewers whowere most in tune with the film understood that its ex-treme violence was a necessary prerequisite to tran-scendence. Therefore, the more violent the film couldbe, the deeper and truer an evocation of the ritual sac-rifice it would offer. Thus, its violence, provided that itwas graphic and not oblique and indirect, provided themost direct route to realism, that is, to the truth of theritual that was being enacted through violence. Thefilm’s graphic violence offered testimony to the faith ofMel Gibson as filmmaker and to the reality of the spir-itual domain toward which the film points.

Grasping these relationships, Christian reviewers ofthe film wrote that “Gibson is giving us a look at whatthat blood sacrifice actually was [italics added].”5 An-other wrote that the film “faithfully depicts” the horrorsinflicted upon Jesus, adding: “This is the first time I’ve

seen a story of the Truth told truthfully.”6 Yet anotherwrote: “Because it looks so real, the scene where Jesus iswhipped with a cruel ‘cat-o-nine-tails’ designed to grabthe skin and rip out great chunks of flesh becomes al-most unbearable. In fact, I could never reassure myselfthat any of the results of Jesus’ torture ‘looked fake.’”7

For many of these reviewers, the physical and spir-itual realities incarnated in the film’s violence necessi-tated a shift from their usual condemnation of graphicfilm violence to its praise. Their judgment that the film’sviolence is truthful and realistic led some of the review-ers, who typically oppose graphic movie violence, to ap-plaud it in Gibson’s film. “Although many will recoilfrom its graphic nature, the horror Gibson shows us isnecessary for a true understanding of the sacrifice andthe terrible cost that was paid when God sent his onlySon to die,” wrote a reviewer for Crosswalk.8 Anotherwrote: “According to Preview’s standards, the violencewould earn this film a negative acceptability rating, butif there was ever a place where violence is appropriate,or acceptable, this is it.”9 And James Dobson offered thispraise: “In any other context, I could not in good con-science recommend a movie containing this degree ofviolent content. However, in this case, the violence is in-tended not to titillate or entertain, but to emphasize thereality of the unspeakable suffering that our Savior en-dured on our behalf.”10

As I noted, one basis among Christian viewers forperceptions of the film’s realism was ontological. Visu-alized in such detail, Christ’s suffering opens the gatestoward the sacred. However, another and more mun-dane consideration motivated their evaluations, and thiswas a matter of the film’s cinematic context. The view-ers measured Gibson’s movie against other Hollywood

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A more oblique visual approach in Ben-Hur (1959)

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depictions of Jesus’ torture and crucifixion. The film’sgraphic violence was judged to be “realistic” in com-parison with the pre-existing cinematic tradition ofsanitized and oblique depictions of crucifixion. In suchearlier films as The Robe (1953), The Greatest Story EverTold (1965) and Ben-Hur (1959), the camera discretelyaverts its gaze from Christ on the cross, and none of thewhipping and beating that followed his arrest is de-picted. By comparison, Gibson’s film was judged astruer. The reviewer for Christian Answers acknowledgedthat:

classic-style Passion films probably wouldn’t havethe same effect on today’s audiences that they didon those of 50 years ago, because techniques ofextreme graphic violence have been used in filmsof all types, from war movies with a message ofself-sacrifice to ridiculous horror and horror-comedy flicks. Moviegoing audiences are desensi-tized, are bored by the old-style “less is more”approach, and demand “realism.”11

Because of its contrast to sanitized depictions of thePassion—which had been the norm in Hollywoodcinema—Gibson’s graphic violence equates with “real-ism.” Moreover, this reviewer acknowledges thatgraphic violence has become a kind of lingua franca incontemporary cinema, a key means for reaching mod-ern audiences, and that, from this standpoint, Gibsonwas under a certain compulsion to employ it as a meansof reaching, of affecting, modern viewers.

Gibson’s film, then, is judged to be realistic for rea-sons of religious ontology and comparative cinematiccontext. Interestingly, however, these perceptions leapacross the manner in which the film gives us a violencethat is stylized in manifestly cinematic, shrewd, and cal-culated ways. I want to examine the film’s style in somedetail before asking why the presence of style seemed tocount for so little in the reactions of viewers, why theywere so ready to pass over style in order to locate truthand realism at the level of content.

Based on the reviews that I sampled and quoted,one would not know that The Passion of the Christ is adigital effects-intensive film. But, in fact, many ele-ments in the picture’s depiction of violence have beenachieved through digital means. Gibson, however, hasnot advertised this fact in the manner that The Lord ofthe Rings (2001) or The Matrix or Spider-Man (2002)are marketed as special effects-intensive films. The dig-ital wizardry in The Passion of the Christ is like a familysecret that stays closeted; the film’s marketing stressedthe rhetoric of faith and truth rather than cinematic ar-

tifice. The emphasis even extends to the DVD edition ofthe film, which is conspicuously lacking in the kind ofbehind-the-scenes, how-they-did-it featurettes that arecommonly found on the DVDs of other special effects-intensive pictures. Anecdotally, I can report that aCatholic colleague of mine actually denied, and foundit very hard to believe, that much of the film’s violencewas achieved digitally. If the film’s digital origins runcounter to its rhetoric of faith and realism, why then doviewers leap so readily across its stylized violence toembrace a view that it is true?

An immediate but only partly satisfying answer isthat they do not notice the effects as effects. Thus, inpraising the film as being truthful, accurate, and realis-tic, reviewers are also implicitly praising these qualitieswithin the film’s digital imagery. Digital imagery ismost famous for its overtly unreal creations like thedinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993). Digital imagery isused in fantasy contexts to show off imaginary crea-tures and to create effects that could not be photo-graphed, like the thousands of Orcs in the Lord of theRings films. At the same time, however, in contempo-rary film, digital imaging techniques are exploited inmore subtle ways, below the viewer’s radar, at a level notgenerally noticed by audiences. These techniques in-clude the process of digital grading, used in O Brother,Where Art Thou? (2000), Lord of the Rings, and otherfilms to alter color, contrast, light, and many otherimage attributes in post-production.12 This is a sublim-inal level of image manipulation; audiences typically donot notice these alterations. Viewers do notice digitalcreatures like Gollum but not a digital lighting effectused on a flesh-and-blood actor. Given the often sub-liminal presence of digital effects in modern cinema, itwas inevitable that eventually they would confuse judg-ments about accuracy and realism. So, among its othersignificant attributes, The Passion of the Christ gives usperhaps the first really striking demonstration of digitalwizardry used to create images that viewers deemtruthful and authentic rather than evidently fantastic.

In the following discussion of the film’s presen-tation of violence, and of its digital effects, I want toclarify how the violence was achieved in cinematicterms, and to contrast what clearly emerge as artisticdecisions by Gibson and his team of filmmakers withwhat we know about the history and physiology ofscourging and crucifixion. Some striking disparitiesprevail between what the film visualizes and what thehistorical record tells us of these practices. In the dis-cussion that follows, I am assuming that fidelity to thehistorical record constitutes one basis for realism in ahistorical drama like The Passion of the Christ. Delib-

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erately diverging from this record takes us toward thestylistic domain, toward the artifice of cinematic fic-tion, and away from realism, at least in terms of itshistorical constituent. While this divergence does notthreaten the degree of realism perceived in the picture’sviolence by the “naïve” viewer, it does demonstrate anumber of ways that the film’s violence is closer to“movie violence” than to the actuality of the events de-picted. After examining the film’s digital violence, Ireturn to the questions that opened the essay and ex-amine the ways that the comments from Christian re-viewers I have sampled are part of an old and enduringtradition of viewer response to movie violence, and,even more generally, to movies themselves.

The Passion of the Christ featured 135 digital effectsshots,13 but the actual number of special effects shotsclimbs even higher if one considers traditional ap-proaches as well. Altogether, the effects in the film rep-resent the full spectrum of film wizardry, includingmatte paintings, greenscreen work, wire removal,miniature models, and animatronics. In the openingshot, for example, the camera pans down from a skywhich is a digital matte painting. Some of the extremelong shots of Christ on the cross utilize an animatronicmodel. Since the film’s violence is my focus, I would liketo concentrate on two now-famous sequences—thelengthy sequence of Jesus’ scourging, and the brieferscene of a nail being driven into his hand on the cross.

One way of measuring the realism of these scenes isto compare them with what we know about these meth-ods of Roman torture. If the depicted violence faithfullyreproduces the known facts of this ritual practice, thenwe can say that the film honors the historical constituent

of its violence. If not, then we begin to enter a worldmore imaginary than historical, one where the emphasisfalls on the first term of the descriptor “movie violence.”The scourging scene is one of the longest and most in-tensively violent in the film. Along with allied scenes ofJesus being beaten and then suffering on the cross, thescourging scene gives the film an ideal structure fordramatizing violence that the viewer is encouraged to find deviant and grossly objectionable. SociologistKaren Cerulo has analyzed the narrative structures thatprompt viewers to respond to and evaluate violence ingiven ways, depending on how narrative events are se-quenced. One of these structures she calls “the victimsequence.” Such a sequence enables filmmakers to estab-lish “an early link between victims of violence and theheinous nature of the acts that befall them.”14 In a victimsequence: “The victim provides the porthole throughwhich [viewers] enter the story. In this way, victim for-mats . . . prioritize the dark side of violence. Violent ac-tors along with their motives and circumstances are metfrom the vantage point of the offended.”15 The structurepromotes an alliance with the offended, and emphasizesthe gross and unacceptable nature of the violence. Thisis clearly how the design of the scourging scene is meantto operate, guiding the viewer toward a moral judgmentthat the violence is objectionable.

The scene shows an extreme violation of Jesus’body and concentrates on the intensity of his suffering.It shows a Roman guard using the type of weapon thatin all probability was used on Jesus, a flagrum, a shortwhip with iron balls and sheep bones tied to the ends ofits thongs. Flogging with this weapon was the prelimi-nary to every Roman execution, unless the victim was

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The scourging scene emphasizes the suffering of the victim

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female. A flagrum would typically do a great deal ofdamage, ripping through the skin, laying bare the skele-tal muscles and then shredding these as well. Thiswould produce a great deal of blood loss, even bringingon circulatory shock.16 The objective was to whip thevictim to a state just short of death. Sometimes victimsdied during the scourging, so a degree of skill was in-volved in bringing the victim as close to this point aspossible. The amount of blood lost during scourgingtypically helped determine how long the victim sur-vived on the cross.

While Gibson shows the right weapon, however,and a very long scene of flesh-gouging flaying, he has inother respects moved the scene away from a historicallyoriented physical realism. There is, for example, verylittle evident blood loss in the scene, whereas in realitythis type of flaying produced copious bleeding. In thefilm, the flagrum opens gaping wounds, but these don’textrude much blood, despite the exposure of muscleand bone. Most of the blood visible in the scene appearsat its end, in a high-angle shot that shows a rather taste-ful spatter around the whipping post, a spatter thatlooks a bit like a Jackson Pollock painting. It is not im-mediately clear why there is so little blood in the scene.Perhaps it was a matter of special effects economics—liquids remain rather difficult to do convincingly in thedigital realm. Perhaps Gibson simply felt that too muchblood would be distasteful for the audience, but if weare judging the scene for its historical realism, thereshould be much more.

Additionally, Jesus should be naked. The Romansstripped their victims before scourging, and typicallywhipped their back as well as their buttocks. If the vic-

tim collapsed as the movie character does, the flagrummight also shred the genitalia. Obviously, depicting anaked Jesus with genitalia exposed and even woundedconstitutes a taboo, and thus Gibson gives us a clothedChrist. But in other respects, too, what Gibson shows fitsin with the long tradition of movie whippings, wherethe victim has his back exposed but otherwise remainsclothed. And the movie Jesus takes the pain with thesame kind of stoicism that Mel Gibson and other cellu-loid heroes have exhibited in the torture scenes in theirmovies. He does not wail and scream in agony. He gri-maces and holds it back, as movie heroes have alwaysdone. Crying is considered unmanly; movie heroesnever do it, no matter what pain they are in, and neitherdoes Gibson’s Jesus. On these measures, then, the scenehas been inflected in a direction that is more ideologicaland tasteful than it is authentic. As horrific as the sceneis, these compromises mute the degree of brutality thatwould otherwise be present—and that should be pres-ent from the standpoint of historical realism.

Key elements of the scene’s violence are digitallycreated.17 The flagrum itself is a digital effect; it had noexistence as a prop wielded by the actor during theprocess of scourging. The actor playing the guard pan-tomimed the whipping, and the whip itself was addedas a greenscreened element and tracked onto his move-ments. The wounds that open on Jesus’ back were alsodigital effects and were accomplished in a variety ofways. In the early stages of the whipping, the actor JimCaviezel was made up with the wounds attached asprosthetics to his back. These were then covered withdigital skin elements that were removed via computerwhen the whip struck, to simulate the sudden opening

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In one of the film’s most unrealistic details, Jesus’ scourging causes little bleeding

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of a wound. But this description is a little misleading.The whip, of course, never actually struck anything,and it never co-existed with the actors in any three-dimensional space. The whip and the wound revealswere composited additions to the scene as it had beenphotographed. Moreover, the sprays of blood and skincaused by the whipping were digital elements. Thesewere greenscreened and then added into the shot dur-ing post-production. In the later stages of the scourg-ing, when there were more wounds than unbroken skinon the character’s back, the process was reversed.Caviezel was shot without wound prosthetics, and thesewere then tracked digitally onto him.

An example of this technique is found in the mostgruesome moment in the scene, when the flagrum’steeth wrap around Jesus’ side and rip out a large chunkof flesh. Caviezel was filmed clean, without the corre-sponding wound prosthetic on his body, and he pan-tomimed Jesus’ reaction. A body double was outfittedwith the wound prosthetic (with the flagrum’s teethembedded in it), and was then filmed as the teeth wereripped out. This element was then digitally trackedonto Caviezel’s body with some digital painting used tohide the seams of the composite.

Where does “realism” enter into this assembly? Thescourging is presented as a series of composited shots,made from numerous elements that were photo-graphed separately. Some of these—the digital paintingused to blend skin tones and hide the edges of compos-ited elements—were not photographed at all. Thus, onemeasure of realism—the spatial reality of the photo-graphed scene, that is, cinematic realism in a Baziniansense—is lacking. Of course, this measure of realism is

always lacking in special-effects shots, but in this caseviewers do not relate to the scene as a special-effectsscene. Why do viewers favorably disposed to the filmfind these effects, and others like them, to be credibleand “realistic,” to the point that many are audiblymoved to tears while watching the sequence? They haveno real-world frame of reference to measure the vio-lence by—no one has seen the kind of scourging de-picted here, and few are knowledgeable about itshistorical details. The crux of the matter is that thewounding appears credible, especially in the absence ofthese other frames of reference, provided viewers sus-pend their disbelief. To scrutinize this sequence forevidence of digital manipulation would involve an ac-knowledgment of the filmmakers’ stylizations—andthus of the artificiality of the scene.

A key constituent of the shot’s design is its brevity.The moment where the scourge rips out the chunk offlesh is very quick. It is just a flash of an image really,and this brevity serves to hide the digital manipulationsthat are at work. It does not allow viewers to study theblend of elements in the composited image. It is fol-lowed by a burst of music and by reaction shots (horri-fied onlookers, a laughing guard) that are meant toemphasize and underline the viewer’s emotional re-sponse. Furthermore, the framing of the shot is con-spicuous and ostentatious. Gibson cuts to a low cameraangle just before the mutilation occurs, and a viewer at-tentive to stylistic design knows that something dra-matic is about to occur. The low camera angle brings usin close to Jesus, and the composition centers on hisside, the better to concentrate our attention on the spotthat will be mutilated. The composition is meant to

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The wound reveals are digital effects

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serve the effect, to display it, to flaunt it. This is a verycalculated stylistic design—the camera set-up empha-sizes the effect while the editing prevents it from beingexposed as an effect—and it takes us some distancefrom notions of cinematic realism, at least to the extentthat such notions imply that a filmmaker is only mini-mally involved in mediating on-screen action.

So the basis for an attribution of realism must lieelsewhere, and before I suggest where that may be, Iwant to look at some details of the crucifixion sceneand mention another of the film’s high-profile effectsshots. As with the scourging, Gibson glosses over someof the more unpleasant aspects of death by crucifixion.Death for these victims typically occurred from a com-bination of numerous factors, including hypovolemicshock as an aftereffect of scourging, cardiac rupture,and suffocation due to stress on the respiratory system.Hanging on a cross, with all of the body’s weightpulling down on the arms and shoulders, kept the vic-tim’s chest muscles and lungs in a state of sustained in-halation. This made it very difficult to breathe or speak.To breathe out, the victim had to push upward withfeet, wrists, and elbows. When this became impossible,asphyxiation would occur. Pushing upward, however,caused excruciating pain.

The crucifixion victims in the film show little diffi-culty in breathing or speaking, and in this respect thefilm is quite consistent with other Hollywood picturesthat hang them on the cross but do not deprive them ofdialogue. According to scripture, Jesus did speak fromthe cross seven times. For the sake of accuracy, the filmshould show that the effort at speech itself involvedtremendous physical struggle and torment—it would

require that the victim maneuver himself into a posi-tion where exhalation could occur. Moreover, while vic-tims languished on the cross, insects would feed ontheir eyes, on their open wounds, and would burrowinto their noses, mouths, and ears. Gibson omits suchdetails, and while The Passion of the Christ does featurebirds of prey tearing at the flesh of victims, the filmshows this as a kind of horror movie effect—a carrionbird suddenly plucks the eye out of one of the thieves.What we do not see is any sustained assault by insectsand other predators.

Like the gouging of Jesus’ side during the scourg-ing, the moment where his hand is nailed to the cross isone of the film’s high-intensity scenes of violence. It,too, is a digital composite, made from a live-action ele-ment of Caviezel with his arm on the cross and hishand tucked underneath through a slot, and green-screened elements of a spurting blood tube, a nailpounded into the end of the cross, and a prostheticpalm with wiggling fingers supplied by a body double.

As numerous commentators have pointed out, thenailing of the hand is not physically possible. Becausethe palm of the hand cannot support the weight of thebody, the Romans nailed their victims in the wrist, justabove the carpals, in a location that probably severed themedian nerve, causing excruciating pain throughout thearm and shoulder. This is why the maneuvering neces-sary for breathing caused such pain—it aggravated thecrushed or severed median nerve. Nailing the wrist inthis way did not sever the radial or ulnar arteries, whichrun along either side of the wrist. While scourging,therefore, caused major blood loss, crucifixion did not,because the impalements did not sever major arteries in

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either the wrists or the feet. Thus, the spectacular bloodspurt in the film that greets the nail through the palm ispurely a matter of cinema and its stylistics of violencerather than an issue of realism, understood in terms ofthe historical and physiological practice of crucifixion.In modern cinema, dramatic woundings typically in-volve impressive arterial spurts, and Gibson’s staging ofthe scene places the action clearly within this context. Itowes more to cinema than to history.

Why the palm and not the wrist? Although in-accurate, some commentators have suggested that Gib-son did this “to preserve familiarity with the story asmost people visualize it.”18 But this explanation seemsrelatively unconvincing, especially in a film that wentto such lengths to recreate an ancient world as to havethe actors speak in a tongue requiring subtitles. Analternative explanation is that Gibson perhaps deemeda nail through the palm to be more excruciating for thefilm viewer to watch than one through the wrist. Anassault to a man’s hand seems more personal andpsychologically punishing than an assault to the wrist,and the film viewer would intuitively make this distinc-tion. So it seems likely that nailing the palm enabledGibson to ramp up the scene’s violence in a mannerthat he desired, and that the dramatic blood spurt visi-bly emphasizes.

A close look at Gibson’s account of the crucifixionhas shown what the scourging scene also revealed,namely, that The Passion of the Christ stylizes itsviolence in ways that are very contemporary and areconsistent with modern cinema traditions of screenviolence. In doing so, the film fails to honor the stan-dards of historical realism that it has made one of the

key elements of its identity. While the cinematographyof the film emulates the look of old masters likeRaphael, Caravaggio, and Géricault,19 the staging of theaction, with its blood spurts, prosthetic wounds, andslow-motion inserts, places the violence in a cinematicvernacular that is immediately familiar and accessibleto modern viewers.

In this sense, there is more of cinema style than of“realism” to the film. However, because the style is fa-miliar, it may help to foster a viewer’s sense that Gibsonhas achieved a higher degree of realism than have otherfilms depicting these events. Because the style is so con-temporary, it may seem inherently truer for viewers.And yet for this very reason it is important to be care-ful not to conflate aspects of cinematic style with no-tions of realism. Stylistic designs that were hailed fortheir realism at one point in time may later come toseem excessively ornate and mannered. The slow mo-tion and montage editing in the work of Sam Peckin-pah give us a striking example of this, and it may wellbe that the digital effects and bloody flourishes of ThePassion of the Christ will become more transparent astechnique a decade from now.

I have been giving close and detailed attention tothe film’s stylistic rendition of violence in order to ques-tion its degree of “realism,” and I have been suggestingthat, in some key respects, there is more of cinema stylehere than of historically based authenticity. But an im-portant question remains unanswered—do viewerscare? To put this another way, do viewers notice theseattributes of stylistic design as design or do they paymore attention to content? How much does cinemastyle count relative to behavior depicted on screen?

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The nailing of Jesus’ palms was a digitally composited effect

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If we adopt a historical perspective on these ques-tions, we find that they are enduring ones, and share the-matic constancy with audience reactions to movieviolence since the inception of the medium. As I havediscussed in Classical Film Violence, the decades-longcensorship and regulation of movie violence, which of-ficially began with a Chicago ordinance in 1907, washighly focused on issues of behavior and referencerather than those of cinematic style. In the years beforeHollywood’s Production Code, municipal and state cen-sors targeted specific behaviors on screen that theydeemed to be objectionable. These included gangsters oroutlaws pointing guns at the camera, killings or assaultsperformed with knives or arrows, crimes of violence di-rected at police or law enforcement officials, and depic-tions of a victim’s pain and suffering. It did not matterwhether these were presented in close-up or long shot,with high-key or low-key lighting, as a montage or not.

When Hollywood passed its Production Code in1930, the emphasis on behavior was written into theCode, and the kinds of material that local censors hadbeen deleting were also written into the Code as specificcontent areas that filmmakers were warned to stay awayfrom. From 1930 until the last vestiges of the Code wereswept away in 1968, the Production Code Administra-tion (PCA), which enforced the Code, was always farmore attentive to content than to issues of cinematicstyle. Because it vetted scripts, the PCA was never in agood position to evaluate and respond to the manner inwhich a filmmaker had stylized scenes of violence. ThePCA came into play during pre-production, not pro-duction itself, but, even so, its key concern lay with vio-lent acts, not their stylistic rendition.

In Classical Film Violence, I define movie violenceas the stylistic encoding of a behavioral act. One can,therefore, examine the behavior or its stylistic depic-tion. The PCA concentrated its regulatory efforts onbehavior—how gangsters and police were depicted onscreen, for example—rather than on issues of camera-work, lighting, or editing. It considered the referentialaspects of cinema to be of paramount importance, theway that screen characters might act as role models forthe audience. The PCA aimed to shift this role model-ing in as positive a direction as it could. Meanwhile, asit focused on issues of content, filmmakers were learn-ing how to stylistically elaborate scenes of violence, howto use cinema style to make movie violence more vis-ceral, kinetic, and emotionally powerful.

The biggest change that occured in screen violenceafter 1968 was an increase in its stylistic amplitude, thatis, filmmakers continued to depict the same kinds ofviolent acts as before but now gave them more stylis-tically elaborate treatment. By detailing wounds to thebody, and using camerawork and editing to extend thescreen time of violent episodes, film violence has be-come more insistent and expansive, and this change hasoccurred predominantly in the domain of style ratherthan behavior. This is one reason that stylistic consid-erations are so important when examining the subjectof film violence.

The Passion of the Christ exemplifies this increasein stylistic amplitude. Many films have depicted beat-ings, whippings, and crucifixions, but none has giventhese acts the kind of cinematic detailing that Gibson’sfilm provides. So, on the one hand, it exemplifies thestylistic trend of movie violence since the fall of the

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Like earlier Hollywood movies, Gibson’s shows Jesus conversing while on the cross

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Production Code. On the other hand, however, consid-erations of behavior and reference have arguably re-mained uppermost in the minds of many viewersresponding to the film’s violence, much as these issuesdid for the PCA in earlier decades of cinema. Viewerswho perceive the film’s violence—and the digital wiz-ardry that makes it possible—as being “realistic” are,like the PCA, concentrating on issues of behavior. Forthem, this is not an actor portraying a character. This isthe body of Jesus Christ on screen; this is how it was.Christian reviewers of the film have written: “His bodywas beaten, kicked, struck and spat upon, then nailed toa cross to die. The Passion of the Christ faithfully depictsthese horrors inflicted upon our Lord.”20 Another re-flected: “Speaking personally, I was deeply affected by a single thought while watching the movie: I did this to Jesus.”21

Herein lies an interesting paradox in viewers’ re-ception of cinema. While filmmakers think deeply andcarefully about how they orchestrate picture andsound, viewers tend to attribute the details of stylisticdesign to content areas, assimilating them into theirpre-existing schemas of character and situation. In asense, the act of viewing cinema entails the transforma-tion of style into content. A persuasive amount of em-pirical evidence suggests that viewers do not rememberelements of style after seeing a film and that they willfrequently attribute aspects of design to elements ofcontent. In an experiment where viewers were asked torecall what the actors were doing in a series of film clipsand how much and what type of editing was used inthe clips, Robert Kraft found that viewers rememberedthe behaviors quite well but had difficulty recalling de-tails of the editing. He wrote: “One general findingwhich is important to emphasize is that subjects’ mem-ory for easily perceived structural features of film isterribly inaccurate. . . . Cinematic structure can appre-ciably influence viewers’ evaluation of film stories, yetthe structural features themselves are not well remem-bered.”22 Studies of other structural features, such ascamera angle, demonstrated similar findings.23

Summarizing the empirical research on this issue,Paul Messaris concludes: “Whereas the ability to recog-nize the objects in an image, to make sense of a movie’sspace and time transitions, and to grasp the point ofnonnarrative editing . . . is something the typical viewerappears to acquire quite readily, the viewing skills re-quired for the perception of intentionality appear torest on exceptional experience or on explicit training.”24

He points out that one of the barriers to the perceptionof style or artifice is the “authentic look of the worldportrayed in these movies—even when that authentic-

ity is more a matter of convention than of actual fidelityto real-life prototypes.”25

Characters and their behavior have a tremendousimmediacy in film; camera position, editing, and otheraspects of stylistic design do not. Viewers perceive char-acters and behavior; they see them on screen. They donot see style in the same way, do not perceive elementsof design or intention unless they have been trained todo so or unless the design is extremely ostentatious—like “bullet time” in The Matrix or the sudden switch toanime in Kill Bill (2003). Although the objects andevents in the world—or the characters and their sur-roundings in a film—are constituted in and throughour perception systems, they seem to exist naturallybefore us. Writing in another context, Lieberman et al.note:

Because we have the sense of having generatedour thoughts but not our perceptions, we tend totrust the latter in a way we do not trust the former.The products of perception have a “given” qualitythat leads us to feel we are in direct contact withreality. Thoughts are about things, but percep-tions are things, which is why we say, “I am think-ing about Katie” when Katie is absent, but not “Iam having a perception about Katie” when Katieis standing before us. Our perceptions feel imme-diate and unmediated, our thoughts do not . . .26

Characters in film, their behavior, and their physicalsurroundings are things in this fashion, immediatelyperceivable, unambiguously present. The same is nottrue about film structure.

Throughout the history and regulation of screenviolence and the operation of the PCA, behavior re-mained the founding category of perception, but wecan now see that this is an axiom of film viewing ingeneral. It helps to explain why many viewers take theviolence in The Passion of the Christ as being realistic,despite its historical infidelities and its congruence withcinema conventions. For these viewers, its realism is afunction of what is most immediate and given to theirperceptions. Because they seem to see flesh ripped andgouged, because the film’s violence is horrifically de-tailed, it must therefore be a truer depiction of whatJesus endured than earlier films have offered. As a re-sult, the film’s cinematic stylization is not seen as suchbut is subsumed under a category of behavioral refer-ents that are deemed to be true.

Viewers’ judgments about “realistic” violence, then,depend on the style’s congruence with the referentialframeworks that people hold about the violent event

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that is being depicted. But these then overrule style andtake precedence as what the viewer sees. Interestingly,however, these frameworks are not necessarily veridicalbecause most viewers do not have first-hand experienceof the kinds of violence that movies typically portray.How many of us have actually seen a crucifixion? Thus,to some extent, the viewers’ mental frameworks them-selves derive from cinema, and I have noted some of theways that Gibson plays to this in the film. The paradoxof film viewing lies in the reorganization of the cine-matically conventional and contingent by the attri-butional frames of reference viewers bring to the film.Film theory has acknowledged this paradox but hastended to misplace the emphasis. Film theory of the1970s was deeply suspicious of cinema, of its tendencyto induce an impression of reality in viewers, but thistendency was framed as an act of deception, as themedium’s originating sin. It is not that the medium“fools” viewers; it is that viewers seize control of thefilmmaking designs. They reconstitute the sights andsounds that the medium has provided into a set ofnominal categories, understood as people, places,things, and events.

The enduring nature of this reconstitution of themedium, its persistence across decades, suggests thatthe domain of cinematic style remains a latent one forviewers—but latent in a very Freudian way, exerting a determinative influence on their experience whilegoing relatively unrecognized as a key constituent of re-sponse. In this respect, it was intelligent of Gibson torelease the film on DVD without making-of featurettes.By suppressing coverage of visual effects on the DVD,Gibson has ensured that viewers sympathetic to themovie will have a seamless experience of perceivedcinematic realism, unencumbered by undue attentionto the artifice of style. In doing so, he gleaned the para-dox at cinema’s heart, the manner in which behaviortrumps style.

NOTES

1. Dirk Eitzen, “Documentary’s Peculiar Appeals,” in MovingImage Theory: Ecological Considerations, ed. Joseph D. Ander-son (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 183.

2. Ibid., 195.3. Sam Peckinpah Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Los

Angeles, Wild Bunch preview cards, folder no. 65.4. Maurice M. Bloch, “The Presence of Violence in Religion,” in

Why We Watch, ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998), 176–77.

5. Review by Brett Willis, http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2004/thepassionofthechrist.html.

6. Thomas Carder, Child Care Action Project review, http://www.capalert.com/capreports/passionofthechrist.htm.

7. Unsigned review, http://entertainment.planetwisdom.com/movies/thepassion.cfm.

8. Annabelle Robertson, http://www.crosswalk.com/fun/movies/1248029.html.

9. Editor’s Note, http://www.gospelcom.net/preview/passion.html.

10. James Dobson, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” http://www.family.org/docstudy/newsletters/a0030580.cfm.

11. Willis, ibid.12. Stephen Prince, “The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema

and Cinematography in the Digital Era,” Film Quarterly 57,no. 3 (spring 2004): 27–33.

13. See Ron Magid, “Adding Agony to the Passion,” AmericanCinematographer 85, no. 3 (March 2004): 57.

14. Karen A. Cerulo, Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Struc-ture of Right and Wrong (New York: Routledge, 1998), 40.

15. Ibid., 42.16. William D. Edwards, Wesley J. Gabel, Floyd E. Hosmer, “On

the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” Journal of the AmericanMedical Association 255, no. 11 (1986): 1455–63. My subse-quent descriptions in the essay about the physical conse-quences of scourging and crucifixion derive from informationin this article.

17. Jody Duncan, “Passion Play,” Cinefex 97 (April 2004): 27–37.18. Willis, ibid.19. John Bailey and Stephen Pizzello, “A Savior’s Pain,” American

Cinematographer 85, no. 3 (March 2004): 48–61.20. Carder, ibid.21. Dobson, ibid.22. Robert N. Kraft, “The Role of Cutting in the Evaluation

and Retention of Film,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:Learning, Memory, and Cognition 12, no. 1 (January 1986):155–63.

23. Lee M. Mandell and Donald L. Shaw, “Judging People in theNews—Unconsciously: Effect of Camera Angle and BodilyActivity,” Journal of Broadcasting 17, no. 3 (1973): 353–62.

24. Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 164.

25. Ibid., 149.26. Matthew D. Lieberman, Ruth Gaunt, Daniel T. Gilbert, Yaacov

Trope, “Reflection and Reflexion: A Social Cognitive Neuro-science Approach to Attributional Behavior,” forthcoming inAdvances in Experimental Social Psychology 34 (2002):199–249.

STEPHEN PRINCE is President of the Society for Cinema and MediaStudies and the author of numerous books. He has provided manyaudio commentaries on DVDs of films by Akira Kurosawa and SamPeckinpah.

ABSTRACT Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ includes manydigital special effects and significant departures from the physicalfacts of scourging and crucifixion. Yet viewers frequently describedthe film as “realistic.”The essay explores this paradox in terms of therelative weight of importance viewers ascribe to film style as op-posed to content.

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